This online library, which its regulars nickname AO3, ranks among the most important of its kind. Millions of fanfiction enthusiasts search there in vain for their favorite stories, and the wait is beginning to weigh on them. As long as the site remains closed, AO3 offers nothing but its maintenance message. The library, one of the largest of its kind in the world, remains out of reach for those who used to come there to find their stories again.
The victim of a cyberattack, Archive of Our Own had to close its virtual doors on October 29. For more than a week, readers trying to log on to the platform have encountered only a simple maintenance message.
On social media, as on Instagram, readers are beginning to find the wait long. No more precise reopening date has been put forward beyond the one-month horizon indicated by the organization.
They change the ending of a work, invent romance stories, or finally give supporting characters their moment of glory. It is this body of texts, built up over the years, that remains inaccessible.
Romance enthusiasts are among those hardest hit by this outage. For them, the closure suddenly deprives them of a vast corpus of reading that is usually available without interruption.
The organization that operates the site does not envision an immediate return. It hopes for a reopening only within a month. Readers will therefore have to arm themselves with patience.
The principle of these stories is simple: amateur authors take characters and worlds from books, films, or series, write their own version of them, and then share them free of charge online.